What ideas and memories do the oceans hold in their depth and reanimate in response to the trembling of earth’s ecosystems? How to escape the silos of research and inquiry that narrow and fragment the knowledge of the oceans? Asking new questions and using multiple registers of sensing can lead to a revitalization of the ways humans engage with the oceans at this precarious moment and create new pathways for reparative justice.

It was the concept of the ocean as a global commons, free for everyone—first formulated by Hugo Grotius in his 1609 treatise, Mare Liberum—that stimulated a free global market. Today, the free market and the free ocean both suffer from rigorous, exploitive use. Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris proposes nine new practical, technological, and metaphysical scenarios of how to fall in love with the sea, and, eventually, have the sea fall in love with us.

Bringing together visual and written material from TBA21’s commissioning practice and history of exhibitions and live events, The Commissions Book also goes beyond the foundation’s archives to present new works and commissions by Cecilia Bengolea, Claudia Comte, SUPERFLEX, and Territorial Agency, among others.

Searching for the present is a bit like deep sea diving. How to dive without drowning in the turbulent waters of now? When to surface and how to ride a strong current? These are some of the questions that Raqs Media Collective address in their account of contemporaneity, guided by a motley collection of figures lost and found in the turbulence of their practice.

This publication intersperses essays from scholars, historians, and thinkers with a selection of Allan Sekula’s seminal texts and excerpts from his private notebooks. Made and written across the decades, Sekula’s sketches and texts focus on maritime space and the material, economic, and ecological implications of globalization.